


We Forgive As We Forget

by propergoffic



Series: Some Girls Wander By Mistake [2]
Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir, The Sisters of Mercy (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Rock Band, F/F, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Interviews, Sequel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-04
Updated: 2020-11-04
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:56:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27391588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/propergoffic/pseuds/propergoffic
Summary: Thirty years ago, skint broke Gideon Nav and university dropout Harrow Nova started a band.Fifteen years ago, Gideon Nav got on a boat and didn't come back. After one last show, Harrow Nova went into seclusion.For a while.-----Absolutely-not-goth band AU, in which Harrow occupies an Andrew Eldritch shaped space, told through a series of interviews, by an author MUCH too familiar with Sisters of Mercy trivia.
Relationships: Harrowhark Nonagesimus/Ianthe Tridentarius
Series: Some Girls Wander By Mistake [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2001046
Comments: 7
Kudos: 20





	We Forgive As We Forget

**Author's Note:**

> Unable to stop doing the thing, I did more! Set fifteen years on from Nine While Nine. Tempted as I was to add it as another chapter, that fic felt pretty much closed, and... not everyone likes the ship that comes afterwards, y'know?

_I’ll see thee, Leeds._

These were the last words we ever thought we’d hear from Harrowhark, on a cold November night in the mid-1990s. We all thought this was the end, that the moment had been prepared for, that she was off to be enigmatic and reclusive and heartbroken on an abandoned sea fort somewhere off the coast of Norway.

And then, thirty years to the day after John Gaius played ‘Saltwater’ on the radio and introduced an unready nation to Nine While Nine: the unthinkable.

_MEMO FROM THE NINTH HOUSE_

_HARROWHARK_  
_ISAAC TETTARES_  
_JEANNEMARY CHATUR_  
_and IANTHE IDA_

_are_

_NINE WHILE NINE_

_IN SOUND AND FURY, WE ARE REBORN_

In retrospect, she did warn us. And it turned out to be a derelict almost-stately home in the Lake District.

“You may laugh,” she says, in a rambling telephone conversation that’s halfway between interview and bleakly ironic stand-up routine, “but it’s absolutely true. I grew up there, my great-aunts passed on within a week of each other, I’m sole inheritor, and I’ve been there ever since. Living in sin with my drum machine.”

1997’s _Erebos_ wrapped up Nine While Nine as an active band, and publicly mourned Harrowhark’s co-founder, bassist and life partner Gideon Nav. The band’s twentieth birthday passed without comment; Canaan House Records remastered and rereleased the first three albums for its twenty-fifth, but that was that. Why a comeback tour now?

“The stars were right,” Harrowhark observes. “The band’s essentially been a trust for the last however many years it’s been: the trust pays me a stipend every year, and Magnus Quinn, bless him, managed the trust for me. He was supposed to retire, but after a week or two he was getting on his wife’s nerves and she told him he needed to get out more. He came to see me, and he was very dismissive of my circumstances. The words ‘you live like this, dear?’ were used a few times, and possibly ‘you need to get out more’. And he _just_ so happened to have some musicians looking for a band to be in.

“I agreed, mostly to get rid of him, then moved back to Leeds for a bit and met up with the children…”

The ‘children’ in question are both comfortably over thirty, but as Harrowhark takes pains to remind us, she’s fifty-six and we ourselves are as children to her. The next part of the story is known to us, and we take great pleasure in asking if Harrowhark has perchance heard of a local band called Annabel Lee, who bear a remarkable resemblance to the revived Nine While Nine in gearing-up mode…

“Indeed I have. They rip me off something awful, and one day soon I shall be having words with them. After an Annabel Lee gig I know exactly what not to do at our own shows.

“Jeannemary and Isaac are perfectly adequate and confident guitar players, but they’re also fans. They treat the songs as a sacred trust and try to play them exactly like Griddle and I did back in 1984 or whenever, and it’s horrible. It’s like being trapped in my own tribute act. So after the second show I went back to my little flat above the chemist’s and thought long and hard about who could be trusted to be sacrilegious.”

Enter Ianthe Ida, stage right. Three years older than Harrowhark, and in the promo photoshoot she looks ten years younger; an elegant and wraithlike presence, draped around the lead singer’s shoulders like a shroud, while Harrowhark remains a dead space, slight and impenetrable behind a familiar pair of aviator shades. We ask if they’re lovers, and someone in the background of the call seems to have fallen off their chair laughing.

“We commit acts of love,” says Harrowhark, deadpan. “We’ve reached an understanding, though I wish she’d stop sticking her tongue down my ear when she’s pretending to be affectionate.”

* * *

“There’s a lot to be said for a four-piece band,” says Ida herself to tQ a few days later. Unlike Harrowhark, she’s graced us with a personal visit; desaturated, almost monochromatic now her hair’s faded from blonde, near pensionable age and still rocking the poet shirt and velvet strides of yesteryear, she coils listlessly on the sofa opposite us and dispenses a reptilian gospel’s worth of home truths.

“ _Mithraeum_ was the best of the old lineup’s albums — you can hear how much Harry and Silas didn’t get along, how much tension there was between the axes of the band, in every note. I think that was good for her; she needs an enemy. As for the older songs, well: Harry is a terrible guitarist, which means she has to be quite clever as a composer to work around her own limits, so the songs have a lot of emergent complexity that you don’t notice until you’ve taken them apart — which I had to do for _Erebos_. Of course, I can’t play them live either now — ”

We ask why not, and Ida chuckles.

“Fencing accident. At my age, I know. I don’t have full use of the fingers on my right hand any more. Fortunately, I wasn’t hired to play the guitar. I program all the bits the children can’t do and Harry doesn’t want to — drums, bass, keyboard patches — and of course, some of those songs were written for a second voice…”

Nine While Nine’s new venture, the World Without End tour, was kicked off with a handful of downloads, to whit the set list from their surprise appearance at M’era Luna last year. Newer, longer, louder versions of ‘Pray It Sleeps’ and ‘Cytherea’, a streamlined ‘Forgive As We Forget’ that’s essentially a solo number for Ida and her piano, and an entirely new song, ‘Underneath The Rock’.

The first two are eminently danceable versions of the early-Eighties indie singles that propelled Nine While Nine to fame in the first place, heavy industrial groove underpinning Harrowhark’s spine-tingling coloratura, Ida’s mezzo-soprano soaring over the top, not so much backing vocals as punctuating and contesting the lead. The last is in the same vein, a distorted power ballad with the singers trading barbs before Ida fades away, leaving Harrowhark to deliver a savage ninety-second performance poem, deconstructing everything her new partner in crime was wailing on about. It’s very pretty, and very cruel, and it goes like a freight train. We would rather like to own it. Four songs are enough for an EP, at least?

“We are apparently blessed,” Ida explains, “with the ability to sell concert tickets all by ourselves, without a record company needing to be involved. Harry is still very reluctant to talk to record companies. She also insists on reminding me that the old band were the most bootlegged band of the Eighties, probably the Nineties as well until _Erebos_ — and half the people at the shows are recording them anyway, so it looks like that’s still going strong.”

No chance of a studio version?

“God, no. Jeannemary and Isaac would go spare if they were off the road for that long — they are never, spiritually speaking, not on the road — and I think the new sound was meant to mutate, anyway. We wanted the world to hear the engine start, but who knows what it’ll sound like in a year’s time? Pinning us down on record would kill us, and that would stop it all being quite so much fun.”


End file.
